The finance chairman of the Republican national committee, Ray Washburne, travelled to Chicago last Wednesday to solicit money from two big funders who had reached their donation limit for this election cycle. While he was on the plane, the supreme court ruled that there would no longer be any limits. Washburne told the New York Times that when he landed and heard the news, he said: "Eureka". He came back with promises of more cash.

It's the American Way. Just as the constitution ostensibly requires that AK47s be available on demand, it was also apparently designed to open the sluicegates to money in politics, until the entire landscape is flooded with cash and cynicism and the border between what is unethical and what is legal is washed away. It's what the funding fathers intended.

There are lots of areas of American society that could do with more money: preschools, infrastructure, mental health clinics, homeless shelters. The one place it's not needed is in politics. Even in this most polarised of moments, this is one of the few things on which most Americans agree. Indeed, support for limits on campaign donations is high among all income and education levels, party allegiances and political philosophies, and has remained consistent over the last five years. During that time, the supreme court has systematically removed many of the restrictions that did exist. In 2008 spending on the presidential election almost doubled compared with 2004. In 2012 it almost quadrupled compared with 2008. "Every presidential election is the most expensive ever. Elections don't get cheaper," the federal election chairwoman, Ellen Weintraub, told Politico.

The Russian Foreign Ministry urged Ukraine to halt any interior military preparations, which could instigate a civil war in the country, the ministry was quoted as saying on its Facebook.com account.

According to numerous reports, Ukraine is redeploying special task police units from all over the country to the southeastern regions of Ukraine in a bid to thwart anti-government protests, which flared up over the weekend. "According to our information, units of the Interior troops and Ukraine's national guards as well as militants from the illegal armed formation 'The Right Sector' are being amassed in the southeastern parts of Ukraine and in the city of Donetsk," the ministry said.

"We are particularly concerned that the operation involves some 150 American mercenaries from a private company Greystone Ltd., dressed in the uniform of the [Ukrainian] special task police unit Sokol," the ministry said. "Organizers and participants of such incitement are assuming a huge responsibility for threatening upon the rights, freedoms and lives of Ukrainian citizens as well as the stability of Ukraine," the ministry added.

Fox News contributor and failed Wyoming Senate candidate Liz Cheney on Tuesday defended her father by saying that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) "spine doesn't seem to reach her brain" because she wasn't proud of so-called enhanced interrogation used by the Bush administration.

In a Sunday interview with CNN, Pelosi has accused former Vice President Dick Cheney of encouraging torture by setting "a tone and an attitude for the CIA."

And when it came to news that the CIA had misled Congress on the effectiveness of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, Pelosi speculated that the former vice president was "proud" of the misrepresentation.

Speaking to Fox News on Tuesday, Dick Cheney's daughter fired back at the California Democrat.

Europe's top court on Tuesday struck down an EU law forcing telecoms operators to store private phone and email data for up to two years, judging it too invasive, despite its usefulness in combating terrorism.

By allowing EU governments to access the data, "the directive interferes in a particularly serious manner with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data," the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said.

Advocate General Pedro Cruiz Villalon declared the legislation illegal and told the European Union's 28 member states to take the necessary steps to withdraw it.

The decision to scupper the 2006 Data Retention Directive comes as Europe weighs concerns over electronic snooping in the wake of revelations about systematic US surveillance of email and telephone communications.

The revelation that US agencies collected data on millions of European citizens - and even tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel - sparked a wave of controversy and prompted lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic to rethink their data surveillance laws.

Daily Show host Jon Stewart observed on Monday that, as the Senate moves closer to declassifying a report trashing the Central Intelligence Agency's "enhanced interrogation" techniques, the political figures behind it - including former Vice-President Dick Cheney - were resurfacing in the public eye.

"He's like the Wilford Brimley of torture," Stewart said of Cheney, before launching into an impression of Cheney doing a Brimley-like ad for waterboarding, gruffly calling it, "The right thing to do."

Stewart also showed footage of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld from Errol Morris' documentary The Unknown Known in which Rumsfeld parries a question about memos related to torture, blames the memos entirely on the Justice Department, then congratulates himself for, in his mind, stumping the questioner.

If the US State Department's Victoria Nuland had not said "Fuck the EU," few outsiders at the time would have heard of Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, the man on the other end of her famously bugged telephone call. But now Washington's man in Kiev is gaining fame as the face of the CIA-style "destabilization campaign" that brought down Ukraine's monumentally corrupt but legitimately elected President Viktor Yanukovych.

"Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he's told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator," laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. "It used to be the CIA doing these things," he tells Democracy Now. "I know that for a fact." Now it's the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, twitter and facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.

A retired apparatchik, the now repentant McGovern was debating Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a self-described left-winger and the author of two recent essays in The New York Review of Books - "The Haze of Propaganda" and "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine." Both men speak Russian, but they come from different planets.

On Planet McGovern - or my personal take on it - realpolitik rules. The State Department controls the prime funding sources for non-military intervention, including the controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which Washington created to fund covert and clandestine action after Ramparts magazine and others exposed how the CIA channeled money through private foundations, including the Ford Foundation. State also controls the far-better-funded Agency for International Development (USAID), along with a growing network of front groups, cut-outs, and private contractors. State coordinates with like-minded governments and their parallel institutions, mostly in Canada and Western Europe. State's "democracy bureaucracy" oversees nominally private but largely government funded groups like Freedom House. And through Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, State had Geoff Pyatt coordinate the coup in Kiev.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he has a "vast amount" of discretion in how the Justice Department prosecutes the laws that are on the books.

Holder's remarks, during testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, came in response to GOP accusations that he is flouting the law with its positions on marijuana legalization and criminal sentencing.

Leading the questioning was House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who asked Holder whether he believed there were any limits to the administration's prosecutorial discretion.

"There is a vast amount of discretion that a president has - and more specifically that an attorney general has," Holder responded. "But that discretion has to be used in an appropriate way so that your acting consistent with the aims of the statute but at the same time making sure that you are acting in a way that is consistent with our values, consistent with the Constitution and protecting the American people."

Republicans on the panel grilled Holder on the Obama administration's decision not to interfere with marijuana legalization efforts in Colorado and elsewhere, as long as states establish adequate regulations.

Basescu: Troops Coming for 'Specific Missions'

The Russian annexation of Crimea has become a catch-all justification for the US to escalate its military presence virtually anywhere even remotely close, and today it was announced they are planning to send hundreds of ground troops to eastern Romania.

There are already 1,000 US troops in Mihail Kohalniceanu, and President Traian Basescu says the US has requested permission to add 600 more "for specific missions" in the Black Sea.

The letter announcing the request to Romania's parliament also reported the US plans an unspecified increase in the number of aircraft at the base, part of the US effort to increase its military might in the Black Sea region.

Despite making a huge deal of increasing their sway there, the Black Sea hasn't seen significant naval combat in generations, nor would there be any conceivable reason to expect Romania, a NATO member for the past decade, would even theoretically be a target for invasion by Russia, which doesn't border them.

Foreign ministers consider holding joint exercises with Azerbaijan, Armenia and Moldova after annexation of Crimea

Nato has drawn up plans to strengthen military co-operation with the former Soviet states on Russia's southern flank after the Kremlin's seizure of Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea.

Nato foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the alliance's response to the Ukraine crisis amid continued fears of Russia's territorial ambitions and what the Americans term a "tremendous" buildup of Russian forces on Ukraine's eastern border.

Before the meeting, a Nato committee drafted plans "for promoting stability in eastern Europe in the current context" by increasing military co-operation with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Moldova - all in Russia's "near abroad" and considered by Moscow as falling within its sphere of influence.

A confidential seven-page paper leaked to the German news weekly Der Spiegel proposed joint exercises and training between Nato and the three countries, increasing the "interoperability" of their militaries with Nato, and their participation in Nato "smart defence" operations.

With every step in the march towards tyranny, some muffled voice in the media decries the move as "Orwellian." It happens so often that George Orwell's novel may have lost its power as a cautionary tale.

It may be time to conduct an inventory of society and see how well we match the dystopian prediction. George Orwell was an unrelenting social critic constantly tormented by a vision of the future that he imagined. In what many consider his masterpiece work, 1984, he brings this vision to life.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

The novel (spoiler alert) follows Winston through his life living under the watchful eye of Big Brother, an ever-present and fictional figurehead that takes care of the constantly warring nation. Most citizens truly adore Big Brother, and the constant surveillance makes certain those that don't at least behave as though they do.

Winston commits acts of mental rebellion with the encouragement of a colleague named O'Brian. He falls in love, with another young thought criminal named Julia. In the end, O'Brian turns out to be working for Big Brother and Julia and Winston are sent to the Ministry of Love for imprisonment, torture, and reeducation.

More disturbing than the actual plot is the amazing detail Orwell uses to describe the society and the mechanisms by which the ruling elite maintain control. It provides a ready description of mechanisms that citizens should be wary of, or a ready template for an oppressor to establish a government. Those mechanisms and their modern counterparts are discussed below.